Emails are sent to us every day, but sometimes we don’t know who the sender is and where it comes from. Given that we live in an age where malicious emails are constant, while trying to get us to do things we shouldn’t be doing, we think everyone should learn to track emails.
You may not have known this, but a lot of information is provided in an email about the sender. The information here can then be used to trace the email back to the source in many cases. Keep in mind that this guide is not a foolproof way to track down crooks and malicious email senders, but it does work in some cases.
How to map an email address to the source IP address
Tracing the email back to the source makes it easier to prevent your email client from receiving email from the sender. Use this guide to also remove the sender from your personal inbox, and even from your small business inbox.
Trace an email address in Gmail and Outlook
The idea here is to look in the full header of the email, where you will find routing information and metadata. In regular cases we don’t care about this data, but in this case it is very important to track the bad guys.
To do this in Gmail, please open your account, then click on the email you want to follow. In the upper right corner of the email, select the drop-down menu, then click View Original, and from there everything should be available at your fingertips.
In terms of Outlook, seeing all of the information is a little different. Keep in mind that we do this from Outlook on the web, not from the client through Microsoft Office 365.
OK, then to do this, launch Outlook on the web, then open the email in question. In the upper right corner of the message, you should see a button with three dots. Click it, and then select View Message Source. Immediately after that, a new window should appear with all the necessary data about the sender.
Lily: How to extract email headers and track the IP from which the email was sent.
Trace an email address in Outlook Client
Double-click an email to open it outside of the reading pane. Click on File > Properties. The header information appears in the Internet headers box. You can highlight the information in this box, press Ctrl + C to copy and paste it into Notepad or Word to see the entire header at once
Lily: How can I send an anonymous e-mail that cannot be found for free?
Locate the original sender
In order to locate the sender of the email, you must first go to the header of the email, then search for the first receipt. Near the first line received, you should see an IP address. Copy the address then launch MXToolbox.
In the search box, paste the IP address, then click the arrow next to the search button that says MX Search, then select Reverse Search from the list. After that press the Enter button on your keyboard and wait for the results.
Read more: Is your email private? Take these email leak tests.